experience design, emerging media, business and technology [circa 2014…]
egosurf: vi.
“To search the net for your name or links to your web pages. Perhaps connected to long-established SF-fan slang egoscan, to search for one’s name in a fanzine.”
Now a consumable service at: egosurf.org
From the about page:
“egoSurf helps massage the web publishers ego, and thereby maintain the cool equilibrium of the net itself.”
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Art Interactive and Glowlab, a local “network of psychogeographers” is using Central Square as an exhibition and investigation space for the next nine weeks, conducting experiments with laughing bicycles, art/clothing made from trash, and other psychogeographic phenomena.
Wikipedia says, “Psychogeography is “The study of specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals”, according to the article Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation, in Situationniste Internationale No. 1 (1958) .”
I first heard the term psychogeography while reading J.G. Ballard’s The Terminal Beach, Concrete Island, and Crash. Richard Calder is a more recent example of a writer working with these ideas. (Note to the curious: Calder’s writings include some *unusual* tastes and flavors.) Calder may have optioned one of his novels for film production. Of the members of the Situationist International mentioned by Wikipedia, I’m most familar with Guy Debord’s writings, from quite a few semina sessions on media theory, cultural theory, postmodern theory.
Regardless of psychogeography’s origins, all roads lead to the internet now: a quick Google query turns up psychogeography.org.uk, which links to an essay titled Dada Photomontage and net.art Sitemaps that compares Dadaist photomontages to the familar sitemap. The first two citations in the piece are the Yale Style Guide, and Tufte’s Visualizing Information.
The circle closes easily, since one of the link threads leads to socialfiction.org, where you find a page on [Generative] Psychogeogrpahy. Random note; socialfiction’s banner carries references to “carthographic sadism * gabber avant-gardism * experimental knowledge * DIY urbanism” – all likely cadidates for Amazon’s SIP statistically improbable phrases listings. Perhaps most intriguing is “disco socialism”. Now that might catch on in some public policy circles that could use a bit of help picking a good back beat…
A quick selection of events that looked interesting:
TUESDAY NOVEMBER 15TH, 6:30PM – 8:30PM
6:30PM – 8:30PM: N55 Artist Talk & Dinner
Hosted with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT
Danish artists’ group N55 creates mobile tools and situations for everyday living: a workplace, a modular boat, a shop, a factory, a clean air machine, a commune, and even a personal rocket. Food & Drink provided. NOTE: This event is hosted at CAVS, 265 Mass Ave, 3Fl (Bldg N-52, Rm 390), Cambridge MA.
THURSDAY OCTOBER 27TH, 6PM – 9PM
6PM – 9PM: Glowlab Party!
Hosted by the Boston Society of Architects. All young artists, designers, architects and their friends are invited to enjoy good food and cheer and become a part of a growing network of young professionals who are shaping the future of Boston. Free drinks & entertainment. RSVP to bsa@architects.org.
For those of you with fashion inclinations (spurred by watching too much InStyle?)
SATURDAY DECEMBER 10TH, 12PM – 6PM
12PM – 5PM: DIY Wearable Challenge
Make an interactive outfit from Cambridge trash and discarded electronics Led by Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki.
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Concept maps popped onto the radar last week when an article in Wired highlighted a concept mapping tool called Cmap. Cmap is one of a variety of concept mapping tools that’s in use in schools and other educational settings to teach children to model the structure and relationships connecting – well – concepts.
The root idea of using concept mapping in educational settings is to move away from static models of knowledge, and toward dynamic models of relationships between concepts that allow new kinds of reasoning, understanding, and knowledge. That sounds a lot like the purpose of OWL.
It might be a stretch to say that by advocating concept maps, schools are in fact training kids to create ontologies as a basic learning and teaching method, and a vehicle for communicating complex ideas – but it’s a very interesting stretch all the same. As Information Architects, we’re familiar with the ways that structured visualizations of interconnected things – pages, topics, functions, etc. – communicate complex notions quickly and more effectively than words. But most of the rest of the world doesn’t think and communicate this way – or at least isn’t consciously aware that it does.
It seems reasonable that kids who learn to think in terms of concept maps from an early age might start using them to directly communicate their understandings of all kinds of things throughout life. It might be a great way to communicate the complex thoughts and ideas at play when answering a simple question like “What do you think about the war in Iraq?”
Author Nancy Kress explores this excact idea in the science fiction novel ‘Beggars In Spain’, calling the constructions “thought strings”. In Kress’ book, thought strings are the preferred method of communcation for extremely intelligent genetically engineered children, who have in effect moved to realms of cognitive complexity that exceed the structural capacity of ordinary languages. As Kress describes them, the density and multidimensional nature of thought strings makes it much easier to share nuanced understandings of extremely complex domains, ideas, and situations in a compact way.
I’ve only read the first novel in the trilogy, so I can’t speak to how Kress develops the idea of thought strings, but there’s a clear connection between the construct she defines and the concept map as laid out by Novak, who says, “it is best to construct concept maps with reference to some particular question we seek to answer or some situation or event that we are trying to understand”.
Excerpts from the Wired article:
“Concept maps can be used to assess student knowledge, encourage thinking and problem solving instead of rote learning, organize information for writing projects and help teachers write new curricula. “
“We need to move education from a memorizing system and repetitive system to a dynamic system,” said Gaspar Tarte, who is spearheading education reform in Panama as the country’s secretary of governmental innovation.”
“We would like to use tools and a methodology that helps children construct knowledge,” Tarte said. “Concept maps was the best tool that we found.”
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